Shapeways How to See Everything You Uploaded by Who You Follow
What do y'all exercise when your 3D model is broken? I hatefulreally cleaved, like "can't fifty-fifty upload it" cleaved, or "half of my triangles are disappearing" broken? In this post we'll talk about what to do when your usual mesh-repairing strategies fail and you need to bring out the big guns.
Let'south practice this by example. So that we can follow exactly what's going incorrect, we'll create a bad mesh by modifying an existing 3D model, my Deltoidal Hexecontahedron Catalan Bracelet:
We're going to turn this into a tealight ring and add some solid faces to the wireframe to create a partially-enclosed look. The screenshot below shows what it looked like when I did this in TopMod; I added the closed triangle faces, and everything seems fine:
Overnice! But when nosotros try to upload to Shapeways, we become this error message:
First line of defense: Meshmixer
Meshmixer is a great kickoff tool for modifying 3D meshes; for an in-depth example run into our previous article Tutorial Tuesday 50: Using Meshmixer to Make 3D Models Thick Enough to 3D Print. Only, in this case, when nosotros open our cleaved file in Meshmixer to see what'south going incorrect, the faces don't load in. Although Meshmixer knows something is wrong here, its Inspector cannot repair it:
2d line of defense: MeshLab
Another not bad mesh-manipulation tool is MeshLab; for a primer on making simple mesh fixes with MeshLab, cheque out our previous article Tutorial Tuesday five: Quick Fixes With MeshLab. Information technology'due south more complicated than Meshmixer, simply can oft accept care of bad geometry like reversed normals and non-manifold faces. However, when we attempt to open our broken file in MeshLab nosotros get this error:
After opening the file and looking through some of the Cleaning & Repairing filters, nosotros run into that there are some not-manifold faces:
The problem lies with where the new faces intersect. When we added those new triangles, we created some bad geometry where the pairs of coincident faces meet. Alas, although MeshLab can identify these problems, it'southward not able to actually fix them; usual MeshLab repair menu options such as "Remove Faces from Nonmanifold Edges" and "Remove T-Vertices by Border Flip" are unsuccessful here.
The big guns: MakePrintable
If y'all have a Windows machine, you lot tin endeavor using the professional software Netfabb to repair this model. Netfabb is free for students, simply for the rest of usa information technology costs $30,per calendar month. For professionals in industry this is probably reasonable, but for smaller businesses and hobbyists it'south pretty steep.
Luckily, with any platform and for no money at all you lot can accept admission to the extremely powerful mesh-repair services at MakePrintable. MakePrintable'due south gratis deject-based repair service lets you lot upload models to repair on their servers, and and so download upwards to 3 repaired models per month. If you demand more than repairs than that, and so for simply $10 per month you tin can upgrade to their Pro service to become access to more features and unlimited downloads. Since Meshmixer and MeshLab tin handle lots of elementary mesh problems, the iii-a-month restriction is not then bad. Only does information technology work? The answer is YES, and in fact in my feel I have NEVER had a model that MakePrintable couldn't repair. That includes successfully repairing my Tentacle Bowl, which was fabricated from thousands of recursively-generated overlapping spheres that resulted in very broken internal geometry.
Let'south see what MakePrintable can do with our model. MakePrintable is a deject-based service that works entirely in your browser, so to get started you just go to makeprintable.com:
Opening and repairing models is free in MakePrintable; it'due south only the final download that counts against your monthly total. This means that nosotros can upload our file and see if MakePrintable will set our file without risking anything. When we upload our model, MakePrintable immediately recognizes its 20 non-manifold edges. Forth the right sidebar are a number of fancy options for the Pro/Paid version, but for our purposes we can merely use the default gratis settings.
And so, can MakePrintable fix this bad geometry? Aye! Note in the paradigm below that the right-paw model has no non-manifold edges anymore, so we should be in the clear. To download the repaired mesh, cull Relieve/Export, then 3D Model, so your filetype, then save the file to your computer. This activeness will reduce your 3-a-calendar month download count, so be sure you are happy with the repair earlier downloading.
In this example our initial cleaved mesh was very simple, and MakePrintable'due south repaired mesh was much finer, with many more triangles. We could have controlled that if we were using the Pro/Paid version, merely in this case nosotros tin can reduce the mesh in Meshmixer and then run through mesh styling TopMod to go exactly the blocky-smooth style we want, which looks like this:
Fixed and ready for Shapeways
Our repaired and remeshed model at present uploads to Shapeways, and we tin gild 3D prints of fancy Deltoidal Hexecontahedron Tealight Rings. Hither's what they look like after printing and photographing for our geekhaus shop:
This was just a simple instance with a handful of faces and edges causing bad geometry; it can of class get much, much worse. Practise you have a broken model? Requite these tools a attempt and so upload your model over again. Allow us know how it goes!
Source: https://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/38657-3d-model-mess-make-printable.html
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